The present invention relates to a collet contrast disk and, more specifically, to a pick-and-place machine module provided with a collet contrast disk to improve pick-and-place capability and accuracy.
Surface mount technology (SMT) component placement systems are commonly called pick-and-place machines or P&Ps. Pick-and-place machines are robotic machines that are used to place surface-mount devices (SMDs) onto a printed circuit board (PCB) or for other similar actions where a small feature is picked up, moved and placed down onto another feature. In any case, they are often used for high speed, high precision placement of a broad range of electronic components, like capacitors, resistors and integrated circuits onto PCBs which are in turn used in computers and consumer electronics as well as industrial, medical, automotive, military and telecommunications equipment.
Pick-and-place machines typically have nozzles that use suction to lift a feature up off of a base and then hold that feature aloft. The nozzles are positioned optically and thus need to “see” or optically detect the feature to be lifted as well as the target. As such, in cases where the feature and the base the feature is lifted off of have similar coloring, the pick-and-place machines have difficulty “seeing” or optically detecting the feature and cannot reliably place the nozzles for suction and lifting. This situation is particularly true for cases where features to be lifted off of are a black components and the base they are lifted off of is also black or dark grey.
When pick-and-place machines cannot be used for reasons such as those described above, manual pick-and-placement is employed as a substitute and leads to misalignments due to human error and increased overall assembly times.